Images of Muir Woods National Monument – Northeastern California, taken in August 2018.

The tallest living things on Earth, the Redwood trees growing in the moderate temperatures along the coast of California, can also live to be over 1000 years old.

This was my second visit to Muir Woods National Monument located just north of San Francisco and as with the first visit I found it hard to come up with ways to represent the size and grandeur of these incredible trees. This year I was visiting in the middle of the summer as opposed to my last visit which was in April; the difference was easy to see as the forest was notably dryer; there were fewer animals and no flowers, even the ground cover was less spectacular than it was last spring. I was also visiting later in the day so the light filtering through the trees was different as it was hitting the canopy at an angle. That fact actually provided me the opportunity to photograph this park in a new way, at least for me, as I concentrated on the light through the leaves and where it filtered its way onto the floor of the forest.